The Hill: Hunger Hoaxes Hinder Food Stamp Reform

The Trump administration is pushing radical changes in the food stamp program as part of the farm bill. Reform efforts may be derailed by activists who vastly exaggerate hunger and portray food handouts as the epitome of social justice. But federal food handouts have already done far too much damage to Americans’ health.

Food stamps are now feeding 42 million people. Twitter activists created a #HandsOffSNAP hashtag to seek to block any efforts at reform. But, while politicians portray food stamps as a nutrition program (Congress changed the name to Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, in 2008), they are actually a blank check to buy more calories.

Food stamps are a perpetual bailout for the junk food industry. A 2016 USDA report revealed that soft drinks are the most common commodity purchased in food stamp households. Together, “sweetened beverages, desserts, salty snacks, candy and sugar” account for 20 percent of food stamp expenditures. Food stamp recipients consume twice as many of their daily calories from sugar-sweetened beverages as do higher incomes groups (12 percent vs. 6 percent), according to a 2015 study in Preventive Medicine.

Food stamps are justified to prevent hunger but the federal government does not even attempt to collect data on how many Americans actually go hungry. The National Academy of Sciences urged USDA to create a hunger gauge in 2006 but the agency has done nothing on that score. Instead, USDA conducts annual surveys measuring a vaporous notion of “food security” — which can simply mean uncertainty about being able to afford groceries in the future or not being able to afford the organic food one prefers. Though USDA stresses that the survey is not a measure of hunger, its results (and those of similar surveys) are perennially twisted to maximize teeth-gnashing.

After equating food insecurity with hunger, handout advocates acknowledge that food insecurity is connected to weight gain. Throughout most of human history, hungry people were portrayed as gaunt, if not emaciated. But nowadays, a profusion of XXL shirt sizes is apparently proof that more free food is needed more than ever before. Blaming obesity on hunger or food insecurity is a way for these advocates to absolve millions of overweight people for every Big Gulp Pepsi they ever drank.

A far more accurate gauge of Americans’ food deprivation is available from international data. The United Nations estimated last year that fewer than 2.5 percent of Americans are undernourished and that 1.4 percent suffered from severe food insecurity. This report tracks with a 2012 Journal of the American Medical Association analysis that noted that “seven times as many (low-income) children are obese as are underweight.”

It would be far more effective to reform food stamps based on the Womens Infant Children program, which provides coupons only for specific relatively healthy foods. A 2014 Stanford University study concluded that prohibiting the use of food stamps for sugary drinks would prevent 141,000 kids from becoming fat and save a quarter million adults from Type 2 diabetes. Restricting food stamp purchases for junk food (a popular bipartisan reform with the nation’s governors and mayors) would have far greater health benefits.

The latest controversies around food stamps are a reminder that hysteria is a poor substitute for hard facts. There is no constitutional right to free junk food. America can aid the truly hungry without creating an illusory safety net that does more to spur obesity than to improve diets.

James Bovard is the author of “Public Policy Hooligan” (Kindle version 2012), “Attention Deficit Democracy” (St. Martin’s/Palgrave, 2006), and eight other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and many other publications.